The Teller and the Tale

Essays on Literature & Culture (1995-2015)

Gabriel Josipovici

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784102135
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes, ' writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a quarter of a century's worth of critical reflection on modern art and literature, Biblical culture, Jewish theology, European identity, the nature of beginnings, and the bittersweetness of writing fiction – to name but a few of the subjects upon which Josipovici's ranging, pansophic attention rests. The author describes paths between these distant regions of space and time with characteristic warmth and ingenuity. Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Pasternak, Eliot, Spark, Valéry, and Beckett dwell here alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cervantes, and the Brothers Grimm. Each of these great writers is a point of departure for personal reflection, and a series of critical essays takes on a second life as a book of intimate recollections and fond remembrances, recalling departed friends and peers, evoking the pain and ecstasy of childhood, the personal struggle to be a writer, and the life-long project of becoming a person. Here is a snapshot of influences on one of the English language's most distinctive voices, and an opinionated, sensual, and informed exposition on Western literature and culture.

Tristram Shandy: Not Waving But Drowning1

YOU’VE COME HERE to listen to a lecture. You are looking forward to a pleasant evening – instructive, you hope, but also funny. But what if, when you arrive, there is no lecturer? What if, instead of facing a podium and a lectern, you sit down and find yourselves looking at a large mirror which takes up the entire end wall of the room and which reflects back to you nothing but yourselves, sitting and waiting? And what if nothing happens in the course of the evening but the sitting and the waiting and the looking at yourselves sitting and waiting?

That, in effect, is what happens in Waiting for Godot. The two tramps are a surrogate for the audience. Just as the audience has come in the expectation of something happening, of being taken out of themselves (is that not why we go to the theatre?), so the two protagonists have come in the hope that today Godot will come. And as the audience waits, so they wait; as they wait in vain, so too the audience. This is extremely disconcerting. We don’t know what to make of it. We don’t know how to respond. In our bafflement we may get angry at the playwright for not fulfilling his part of the tacit bargain (I pay for my seat and you entertain me), or we may laugh and declare the play the funniest thing we have seen and the evening well spent. But we will know deep inside ourselves that both responses are inadequate to the experience.

And this of course is what happens when we pick up Tristram Shandy and settle down with it for a good read. It is, after all, a classic, and we have much enjoyed Middlemarch and Little Dorrit. Why should we not enjoy this? But the story’s inability to move forward consistently frustrates our palpable need to settle into a good story, and we even have the horrible suspicion that what story there is, as in Waiting for Godot, merely dramatises and reflects back at us our own frustrations.

Admirers of the book of course defend it by pointing to its humour, to this frustration as a means of generating laughter. If they are of a more moralising bent they may suggest that this is a way of teaching us about ourselves, and I will, at the end of this lecture (yes, relax, it is a lecture) go down that route myself. But what I wish to concentrate on this evening, just because it tends to be passed over in discussion of the novel, is the element of anxiety that inhabits and, I would say, drives the novel, no less than it does Beckett’s dramatic masterpiece. And I want to suggest that it is this that makes the book great and quite different from the many imitations it has spawned.

What is the source of this anxiety, in both Sterne and Beckett (for it is the same source in both cases)?

Let me approach the question by going on with my analogy of the lecture. Just as you came in the expectation of an instructive and enjoyable evening, alerted to the lecture by our host, so I too have come, summoned by Patrick, with a clear brief and the expectation of an audience of Sterne enthusiasts. But what if I had had no brief, nor even any invitation, yet found myself drawn to giving a lecture? Not a lecture on Sterne, of course, because I have not been invited anywhere, but a lecture tout court. Here I am, fancying myself as a lecturer, an avid reader of other people’s lectures, of course, certain of my ability to impress an audience, but no one has asked me to lecture. What do I do? Do I stand in my room and look in the mirror, try out different postures, and then start? But start what? And start how? And start why?

This, I want to suggest, is the situation in which Sterne finds himself. And he is not alone. Before him, and known to him, are a number of authors who seem to have struggled with the same set of problems, a number of works which seem to explore the same predicament: Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton, the Swift of A Tale of a Tub. From all of these Sterne will draw the strength and the confidence to do what he feels drawn to do, and all of these will figure prominently in his own book. After him will come, apart from Beckett, Kafka, Proust, Mann, Kundera, Bernhard, and many others who have in turn drawn strength from Sterne and the Renaissance tradition of which he was the last great representative.

That tradition is often referred to as the tradition of learned wit. I would prefer to call it the tradition of learned anxiety. In each case we are faced with a situation in which the author feels the desperate need to speak but feels at the same time that he lacks the authority to speak, and that without that authority his work lacks all legitimacy. You remember Kafka’s Land Surveyor in The Castle. He insists that he has been called, but the inhabitants of the Castle and the village deny that. You can stay here and be a land surveyor if you wish, they say, but no one has asked you to come. K, however, feels that he cannot remain and be a land surveyor unless he has been called. Stalemate ensues.

What does it mean, to be called? You all, I am sure, remember the story of the Burning Bush. It is to be found in chapter 3 of the Book of Exodus. Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep out in the desert, when he comes upon a bush which seems to be burning but is not consumed by the flames. Astonished, he approaches, and as he does so God calls to him out of the bush: ‘Moses! Moses!’

And he answered, Here I am. And the Lord said, Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. And the Lord said, I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. And the Lord continued, I have marked well the plight of my people in Egypt and I have heeded their outcry… Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free my people the Israelites, from Egypt. (Exod. 3: 4–10)

God speaks to Moses and orders him to go to Egypt and free his people, and there is no question but that he must obey. This is what being called implies. Alas, no such encounter precedes K’s visit to the Castle, and it is the absence of such an encounter which constitutes the subject of Kafka’s novel.

Consider now the opening of Homer’s Iliad: ‘Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles’. The Goddess invoked is the Muse, and what follows, the whole mighty epic of the Iliad, is nothing other than the bard’s transmission of her song. That song is neither true nor false, for such terms do not apply: it is simply the account of the way things are, and the singing of that account by the bard helps reinforce the memory of it in the community that listens. Judaism and Christianity retain a version of this in their communal repetition of their founding stories in the annual festivals of Passover and Easter, and (in abbreviated form) in the daily or weekly services attended by the faithful. But such communal assent and renewal no longer holds where our artefacts are concerned.

It still did in the West in the High Middle Ages. For example, the sculptors of the churches and the great cathedrals that were the focus of the community received their instructions as to what to portray from the clergy who commissioned them; and how they portrayed the hands of Jesus, say, or the beard of Moses they learned as apprentices in the workshop where they had worked since their youth. This did not make all medieval sculpture identical, as we well know, but it did free them from having to make personal choices of content or form in any self-conscious way, and gave to their work a freshness, an innocence, which all who love medieval art treasure, and which modern artists such as Proust and Eliot, Picasso and Maxwell Davies, relish in the art of the Middle Ages.

English literature is particularly rich in examples, and I merely pick out one tiny poem to bring home to you how working within a strictly defined tradition, drawing on conventional doctrines and images, makes for a freer rather than a more subservient art, and certainly for a confident and moving art:

Now goth sonne under wod:

Me reweth, Marye, thy faire rode. [rood, cross]

Now goth sonne under Tre:

Me reweth, Marie, thy sone and thee. [me reweth, I feel pity for]

The poet sees the sun going down behind the trees, as it does every evening, and meditates on the crucifixion, the ‘setting’, as it were, of the Son of God. He expresses his sense of pity for both Mary and her child, but that pity is tempered for him and the listener/reader by the knowledge that just as the sun will rise again the following morning, so the Son of God will rise, and, by so doing, save the world and us. The poem effortlessly brings together the natural world, with its cyclical pattern of recurrence, and the unique Christian story. In twenty-three simple words it manages to lament, praise and re-affirm.

It was probably written in the thirteenth century, but such poems (though few as good) went on being recited and then written down till the fifteenth. By the end of that century, though, the world which had given rise to it, as to the churches and cathedrals, was disappearing. By 1600 the consensus on which such art rests had gone for good, the victim of a massive crisis of authority which touched on all areas of society. At a political level the crisis had to do with who rules the land and by what authority. This is explored by Shakespeare in his great cycle of history plays which begins chronologically with the murder of a bad king, Richard II, yet a king who is accepted as God’s regent on earth. The question for Richard’s successors is, if it is legitimate to depose a king because he is bad who is now to decide who is bad and who is good? Any powerful faction can accuse the incumbent king of being bad and proceed to depose him (or, of course, her). This is mirrored in (and deeply intertwined with) the religious crisis of the time. If the Pope is corrupt, as Luther made out, and his authority to be rejected by all right-thinking persons, what happens when other right-thinking persons do not see eye to eye with Luther?

In the realm of art, what happens when the authority of the traditions in which artists had been working for centuries is suddenly called into question? The answer many theorists as well as artists came up with, is that individual genius replaces the dead hand of tradition. This is the story of the Renaissance that was most actively promulgated by the Renaissance itself, and that still seemed persuasive to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the one still popularly held today. But why should the logic that applies to kingship and biblical interpretation not apply to art? In other words, why should not he who seems to himself to be a genius seem merely a madman to others? That is what Cervantes set out to explore. Don Quixote thinks that, like Moses, he has been called, but we know that he is self-deluded. He may be a charming and well-intentioned madman, but as soon as he tries to impose his vision on the world around him it leads to havoc.

Albrecht Dürer, as we know, was one of Luther’s staunchest supporters. But in 1514, three years before Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg, the gesture which is usually regarded as marking the start of the Reformation, he produced a number of remarkable engravings, amongst which were two which he obviously saw as a pair because in every instance but one he gave them away together. The first was entitled St Jerome in his Study and the second, rather more mysteriously, Melencolia I. I don’t think it’s fanciful to see them as Dürer’s response to the crisis of authority I have been exploring. The St Jerome depicts the saint who gave the Christian West its Latin Bible as a man at ease within the tradition, quietly translating the Bible, with his dog at his feet. A skull and an hourglass remind him of his mortality, but he accepts that as a natural part of being human, a small but necessary part in the great chain of tradition. Melencolia I depicts what happens when that sense of tradition has vanished. A large woman sits in the open, next to a ruined house, with her head on her hand, a compass in the other, but she is not working. Her eyes are wide open but she is looking not out at the world but into herself. From her belt hang a bunch of keys and an open purse. Round her, in disarray, lie various measuring instruments and tools, behind her an hourglass and a magic square. Sitting above her is a putto, visibly scribbling. An eerie moonlight blankets the scene and, on the left, above a sheet of water, a bat spreads its wings on which the mysterious title is displayed. The two figures convey an overwhelming impression of tension and anxiety in the midst of both chaos and stasis.

This, we feel, is what happens when the authority of tradition no longer has a hold on us. Far from being liberating, the new freedom leads to melancholy and the inability to act. The condition of melancholy was so prevalent in the Renaissance that all the arts explored it, Dowland and Monteverdi in music, Shakespeare and others in poetry, Dürer and Cranach in art. Robert Burton wrote an ‘anatomy’ of the condition that ran to thousands of pages. Sterne, anticipating Baudelaire, called it Spleen. Freud rightly intuited that it is a condition brought on by a powerful sense of loss for which the psyche lacks the mechanism to mourn adequately because it is unclear exactly what it is that has been lost.

We can see it at work in a play which was to become pivotal for the Romantics but which already exercised an inordinate fascination for Sterne: Hamlet. And Hamlet, of course, from first to last, is concerned with this question of legitimacy. How does it open? With a ghost stalking the battlements of Elsinore. Hamlet is called, the ghost reveals itself as his father, the former King of Denmark, who commands Hamlet to avenge his murder by the brother who has now married his widow and rules in his place. But – and it is a very big but – is the ghost to be believed? Protes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Proust and I
• Tristram Shandy: Not Waving But Drowning
• Empty Rooms
• A Napoleon of Thought: Paul Valéry and his Notebooks
• Reading Kafka Today
• The Stories of the Germans
• The Legends of the Jews
• Two Resurrections
• Medieval Matters
• The Tallith and the Dishcloth
• The Hebrew Poetry of Medieval Spain
• Sacred Trash
• Claudel and the Bible
• ‘Like a Bad Russian Novel’: Eliot in His Letters
• Boris Pasternak
• György Kurtág: Samuel Beckett What is the Word
• ‘The Itch to Write’: Beckett’s Early Letters
• Why Write Fiction?
• Muriel Spark and the Practice of Deception
• Saying Kaddish
• Kafka and the Holy Rabbi of Belz
• The Lost
• Cousins
• Against the ‘Idea of Europe’
• Interruption and the Last Part
• How to Make a Square Move
• When I Begin I Have Already Begun
• The Ouse’s Muddy Bank
• Notes of First Publication
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Gabriel Josipovici
• Copyright